Monthly Archive for June, 2012

: June, 2012

We’re in Skagway, Alaska, at the moment on a Disney Wonder cruise with the kids and grandkids, so blogging this week will be short and sweet–almost to the point of non-existent. This is a very real vacation. Yesterday we saw the magnificent Sawyer… …

I was six feet tall by the time I was in seventh grade. Believe me, in seventh grade this was NOT a good thing. I was taller than Mr. Norton, my rotund seventh grade teacher, and I was taller than every boy in school. This was something on the DNA that came from my father’s side of the family because both his mother and his grandmother were six feet tall as well.

My mother, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 foot 7, saw a looming problem, if you will. I was self-conscious and went around with my shoulders hunched, trying to be shorter. My mother said, “Straighten up.” “Stand straight.” “Shoulders back.” She didn’t say all those things at one time; there were variations on the theme. And she also said, “By the way, would you please get down the Lazy Susan.” That particular piece of holiday serving equipment was stored in an underused cabinet–the top corner cupboard–in the kitchen, and I was the only one who could reach it without having to climb up and down the kitchen stool.

Something else went along with being the tall one. My feet are appropriately sized for someone of my height which means I have size twelve feet in a world where standard shoe sizes for women mostly don’t go beyond size 10. I remember going into Ortega’s shoes in Bisbee as a teenager and being told by a very short-lived shoe salesman that my feet were like “gunboats.” (No, I didn’t kill him. Mr. Ortega fired him, and as my old neighbor, Sophie Kazitski used to say, “Good riddance to the bad rubbish.)

I can’t tell you how my life changed when I hit Seattle and discovered the shoe sizes available at Nordys. Now there’s the miracle of Zappos!!

Being six feet tall and a teenager was not fun. When I married my first husband, I walked down the aisle in ballerina slippers (Hard to find in size 12!) because the groom didn’t want me to be taller than he was. Twenty seven years ago when I married my second husband, I wore heels even though I was several inches taller than he was in my bare feet, but I finally found a guy where the difference in height didn’t make a bit of difference.

When Bill and I married, we had five kids altogether. He had two sons and a daughter, and I had one of each. Bill J., the older of Bill’s sons, is six four. Whenever we’re out in public together, it’s easy for people to look at our relative heights and assume that I’m his “real” mother, but I’m not. His birth mother lost a seven year battle with breast cancer long before I came on the scene, but after twenty-seven years, the idea of “real” or not is pretty much moot.

Eventually Bill J. married and, the way the world works, he now has three daughters. Remember what I said earlier about DNA?

It was clear early on that Lauren, Emily, and Rachel would take after their father in the height department. Once they hit high high school, I told them that if they were ever invited to a prom, I was the fairy grandmother they needed to call because I understand all those tricky shoe size and dress length issues. Last year, when Lauren was a senior, that “Fairy Godmother” call came in. We were all in Tucson for Spring Break. In two hours of purposeful shopping, we managed to find a gorgeous blue floor-length formal for her. During the fitting, I overheard the sales clerk ask her if she would be wearing flats or heels with the dress. Lauren said, “Flats.” WRONG ANSWER!!

Once we were back in the car, I gave her the full benefit of my “ballerina slipper” lecture which is to say, if you’re with a guy who has a problem with how tall you are, he’s probably the WRONG guy! When we got back to the house, I handed her a computer with the Zappos website already tuned up. Lauren ended up going to her prom in the blue dress and with a pair of silver high heeled sandals on her feet. She was gorgeous!! (And yes, I am prejudiced!)

This past weekend, the girls were here for a visit. Lauren was showing off the new 4.5 inch heels she bought to wear on next week’s Disney Wonder Cruise. Once she had the shoes on her feet, the three girls and I lined up for a family photo opportunity. I am proud to report that in that photo, I am the runt of the litter!

That was something I NEVER saw coming. I may not be a blood relative to those three lovely girls, but sure you can’t tell that by looking. …

This week we’re having one of the world’s summertime breakfast treats–WheatChex and fresh peaches and raspberries. Generally speaking I am not a mixed fruit sort of person. That goes for mixed fruit jellies (Are you listening Smuckers?) and for mixed fruit pies. (Rhubarb pies? YES! Strawberry/Rhubarb pies? NOOOOOOOO!)

But cut up fresh peaches with a few raspberries on WheatChex or even Honey Nut Cheerios? Either one of those works for me, because they take me right back to summer time in Bisbee, Arizona, in the Fifties. Not that we had an abundance of fresh raspberries back then. Those didn’t make it to Pay and Tote in Lowell. And what passed for lettuce back then, brownish soggy stuff, turned me into a confirmed LLA (Lifetime Lettuce Avoider.) I would guess that Pay and Tote’s fresh peaches weren’t any better than the lettuce, but we never bought peaches at the store. We grew them.

Our house on Yuma Trail had a yard full of peach and apricot trees as well as a single nectarine. The nectarines never managed to ripen because the tree was easy to climb and we ate them early and often. Fruit on some of the other trees there was less inviting. There were two figs trees, but as far as I know, a ripe fig never crossed my lips. And there was an enormous mulberry tree. That one was ver exciting to climb, but the only thing the berries on that were good for was turning our bare feet purple over the course of the summer.

Does it sound like our yard was an oasis in the desert? Yes, it was. And why was that? Mine water! Around the outside fence of the property ran a pipe that carried water that never went inside. This was the brackish, mineral-laden stew that had to be pumped out of the mines. Rather than waste it, the company (Phelps Dodge) sent it out to the community for free. I can tell you that the fruit trees and grass in town LOVED it.

Back then, free mine water made it possible for Bisbee’s Vista Park in Bisbee to be a tree lined grassy lawn. Once the company figured out that they could use the mine water to leach copper out of the tailings dumps, they took their mine water back. The town’s fruit trees which had thrived on mineral rich water, shriveled and died on a steady diet of fresh and very expensive potable water. If you go visit Vista Park today, you’ll find something that is mostly a xeriscaped wasteland.

But back to the fruit trees. Each summer my mother canned quart after quart of peaches and apricots from the trees in our yard, and we sold some as well. There’s a picture somewhere of my Dad and me, sitting together under a freshly harvested tree with a bushel basket heaped with apricots parked between us.

The peaches from our yard–the ones that didn’t get canned or sold–got peeled and cut up, chopped more than cut. My mother’s utensil drawer had an old tin can which my father had cut off with the tin snips at both ends. That’s what she used to chop up the peaches–the sharp end of that tin can. And that’s how peaches came to our summertime breakfast table–chopped into tiny delectable pieces.

During the school year our father made hot cereal every morning–oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, Malt-o-meal, Zoom, Chocolate Malt-o-Meal, and what he called “Whet-meal,” which was my father’s own peculiar mixture of Malt-o-Meal and Cream of Wheat. He made it on the stove in a four quart Wear-Ever aluminum sauce pan. While he was doing it, the man was in his element, wielding a slotted wooden spoon and singing “It’s nice to get up in the morning, in the good old summer time” at the top of his lungs in his particularly tuneless voice. (We always said, “There are 88 keys on the piano, and Daddy sings in the cracks!”)

The rest of the daily meal planning and cooking for our family of nine were designated as Evie’s problem, but school year breakfasts belonged to Norman. Actually there’s one more mealtime exception to that Mommy-only rule. On Sunday nights, we had cocoa and toast for Sunday Night Supper, and my father made the cocoa from scratch in the same four quart sauce pan.

During those long ago pre-air-conditioning summers, cooking hot cereal for breakfast every morning must have seemed like a bad idea. I’m also sure buying cold cereal for that many people was an expensive proposition, but it worked.

At most mealtimes, we ate what our mother served (A little bit of everything, and everything on your plate!), but for summer breakfasts allowances were made for individual tastes. My father preferred Wheaties–the Breakfast of Champions. I’m not sure how much he liked the flavor, but he certainly enjoyed reading the stories of the athletes featured on the boxes. My mother and I went for Krumbles. (I’m not sure if it was spelled with a C or a K, and since no one makes the old fashioned Krumbles anymore, there’s no way to look it up.) Other people cast their votes for Rice Krispies or Cheerios. (My mother never ponied up the cash for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes.) Whatever we chose, however, it was served with a dollop of my mother’s chopped up peaches and cold milk which was delivered fresh to our doorstep twice a week by generations of milkmen.

I guess it’s understandable how, in the week leading up to Father’s Day, the simple act of eating breakfast has taken me on a long trip down memory lane. I’ve spent the last hour recalling the two people who spent 68 years together being good parents on all the other days that weren’t officially designated as Father’s Day or Mother’s Day.

This morning should be the calm after the storm. The book that has kept me stymied for weeks, the next Ali book, went to my editor in New York yesterday. When I say stymied, I mean I went to sleep thinking about the book; I woke up thinking about the book. And for a lot of the time in between, I tossed and turned thinking about the book. Because this is one of those things where, if it is to be, it is up to me. Usually.

This time I went to my engineer husband for help. Engineers fix things. Bill said, “Why are you doing this the hard way? Why not do it the easy way?” And guess what? Doing it the easy way worked. Finally. But not until I had put myself through the rigors of hell first.

Does that mean I’ll ask him for help sooner than later? Probably not. Stubbornness is evidently a big part of my DNA. So this is a time to say thank you to the guy who is always willing to give me advice when I ask for it and to leave me alone when I don’t. Smart man.

This morning, before I had time to finish my first cup of coffee, I had an e-mail from my publicist in New York reminding me of my ten o’clock interview for the Joanna Brady (Judgment Call) tour that starts next month. She told me the interview was at ten. In New Mexico. Where the interviewer was. Unfortunately I’m in Washington, so the interview was actually at nine o’clock my time. The fact that Arizona is sometimes on Mountain Time and sometimes on Pacific Time is one of those mysteries that New York publicists are never going to decode, so we just have to be prepared to run with it.

But when the interviewer started talking about my “new” book, I had to take a step back because the “new” book for her wasn’t the “new” book for me. That’s the one I just finished. And last night, when my grandson sent me a note asking about my “next” book, I thought he meant the one I’m just starting to think about and I suspected my husband of putting him up to asking the question. In fact, Colt, like the interviewer on the phone, wanted to know about the “next” book due on the shelves of his neighborhood Bartell Drug Store.

So what I’ve learned this morning is this: Sometimes 9 o’clocks and 10 o’clocks turn out to be the same thing. And so do “new” and “next.”

It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken. And now when I go to sleep at night, I’ll be thinking about J. P. Beaumont. …

The first book I ever published was a tiny chapbook of poetry, After the Fire, which came out in the fall of 1984. It was a collection of poems I wrote over a dozen years while I was married to and eventually divorced from a man who died of chronic alcoholism at age 42, a year and a half after our divorce was final.

As I wrote the poems, I thought I was doing “art.” It wasn’t until much later than I understood those little scraps of poetry were a writer’s way of dealing with the essential issues at work in my life. Unfortunately After the Fire is no longer in print, but I’ve heard from readers over the years who have told me that their experiences mirrored mine and how much it helped them to know there were others out there who had or still were dealing with similar problems.

As I said, the book came out in 1984, two years after my former husband’s death at the end of 1982. I was living in Bay Vista, a downtown high rise, at the time, and a the proprietor of a flower shop that operated in the lobby of the commercial space in the building took some copies to sell on consignment. He sold one of them to a customer named Diane Bingham.

Diane was a Vietnam War era widow who, along with a friend, had started a grief support group called Widowed Information Consultation Services of King County. (WICS) She took her copy of After the Fire to the support group she was currently leading where she handed it to a guy named Bill whose wife had recently lost a long battle with breast cancer. He glanced through it, decided it was a feminist diatribe, and handed it right back. He wasn’t wrong. Some of the poems dated from my much earlier bra burning days (Nursing bra on a barbecue grill AFTER I cooked dinner!)

Months passed and then, working through the flower shop owner, Diane Bingham contacted me. She told me about WICS and invited me to come do a poetry reading/creative grieving workshop at the WICS-sponsored annual retreat in June of that year. The retreat was being held on a weekend at a YMCA camp, and my agreeing to go to a weekend camp is about as likely as my winning a Miss America Contest, but I said I would go and I did.

I was nervous about it. To my way of thinking, all the other people there would be far more qualified than I was. After all, they were still married when their spouses died. I was divorced, so I felt as though I hadn’t quite punched my ticket and hadn’t earned the right to be there.

The people at the registration table greeted me warmly and made me feel welcome. They told me that if I felt like grieving, this was the place to do it. The truth is, although my former husband had been gone for two and a half years at that point, I hadn’t done much grief work. When he died, the guys at work had looked at me as though I had two heads and said, “Well, you divorced the guy. What are you upset about?” So I had stuffed the feelings of grief and gone on about my life as though nothing had happened.

But of course something HAD happened. And that weekend, I finally did some of that very necessary grieving, getting the feelings out and talking about them not only during my poetry reading presentation but also later at an evening grief workshop. It turned out that Bill, the guy who DIDN’T like the poetry was there at the retreat, but he also didn’t come to the reading. Instead, he went for an afternoon walk on the beach. And although someone (acting as a matchmaker) had tried introducing us at lunch, I had been too nervous to pay any attention.

We met again at the evening session where Bill and I discovered that our first spouses had died on the same day of the year, two years apart. (They both died a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve.) We struck up a conversation based on that coincidence, and six months later to the day, we got married. That was almost 27 years ago.

Last month someone from WICS called and asked if I would be a guest at this year’s retreat. Yes, WICS is still in the grief support business, and yes, they still have annual retreats. I wasn’t sure I should accept. The last time I didn’t think I qualified because I was divorced before my husband died. This time I didn’t think I qualified because my husband ISN’T DEAD!!! Yes, Bill and I are still together, alive and kicking, twenty six years later.

But it turns out WICS wants both of us there, and we will be attending together. I suspect Bella will be along, too, smuggled in the back of the car. We won’t be spending the night. I’ll be talking about life after WICS and how coming to that long ago retreat was a first step for both of us as we moved out of our old lives and into a new one together.

So now I’m going to leave you with the title poem from After the Fire.

I have touched the fire.It burned me but I knew I lived.It seared but it made me whole.

He called me.I went gladly though I saw the rocks,Fell laughing through the singeing air.

I have known the fire.I’ll live with nothing rather than with less.The flame is out. There’s nothing left but ash.